Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (30 page)

Butches, Femmes, and Kikis: Creating
Lesbian Subcultures in the 1950s and ’60s

To us it was our world, a small world, yes; but if you are starving you don’t refuse a slice of bread, and we were starving
—
just for the feeling of having others around us: We were the Kings of the hill, we were the Moody Gardens.

—
A Lowell, Massachusetts, woman describing the Moody
Gardens, a working-class gay bar in the 1950s

The bars had nothing to do with us. They were risky and rough. But we had what we needed because we had each other. All the graduate students who were lesbian in my Department found each other sooner or later. It wasn’t the way we looked. It was just a feeling we got that would let us know who was and who wasn’t. It was scary but wonderful
—
operating in a straight world, being totally undetectable by them, but knowing and trusting each other.

—
F.L., a UCLA graduate student in the early 1960s

At first glance it is surprising that it was in the 1950s, in the midst of the worst persecution of homosexuals, that the lesbian subculture grew and defined itself more clearly than ever before, but there are explanations for the phenomenon. As has been discussed in the last two chapters, not only had many women learned about love between women during the war and come together in big cities, but also powerful creators of social definitions in the 1950s such as medical men and political leaders now declared with unprecedented vehemence that those who could love others of the same sex were beings apart from the rest of humanity: They not only loved homosexually; they were homosexuals. As insistent and widespread as that view now was, many women who loved other women believed they had little option but to accept that definition of themselves. The choice of love object determined more than ever before a social identity as well as a sexual identity.

The dichotomy between homosexual and heterosexual was not only firmly drawn but, since homosexuals were of great interest to the media as sick or subversive, knowledge of homosexuality was more widely disseminated than at any previous time in history. Since one who loved the same sex was “a homosexual” and shunned in “normal” society, it became important to many who identified themselves as lesbian to establish a separate society, a subculture, both to avoid exposure such as would be risked in socializing with heterosexuals and to provide a pool of social and sexual contacts, since presumably such contacts could not be obtained in the “normal” society at large.

It is not accurate to speak of
“a
lesbian subculture,” since there were various lesbian subcultures in the 1950s and ’60s, dependent especially on class and age. Working-class and young lesbians (of the middle class as well as the working class) experienced a lesbian society very different from that of upper- and middle-class older lesbians. Despite heterosexuals’ single stereotype of “the lesbian,” lesbian subcultures based on class and age not only had little in common with each other, but their members often distrusted and even disliked one another. The conflict went beyond what was usual in class and generational antagonisms, since each subculture had a firm notion of what lesbian life should be and felt that its conception was compromised by the other group that shared the same minority status. In its virulence it was perhaps analogous to the conflict between older middle-class blacks and young and working-class blacks in the turbulent 1960s, when those groups were attempting to redefine themselves in the context of a new era.

But despite differences, what the lesbian subcultures of the 1950s and ’60s shared was not only the common enemy of homophobia, but also the tremendous burden of conceptualizing themselves with very little history to use as guidelines. Unlike for American ethnic or racial minorities, for mid-century lesbians there were no centuries of customs and mores to incorporate into the patterns they established of how to live. There was less than a hundred years between them and the first definition of the homosexual which called them into being as a social entity, and there was very little history available to them about how women who loved women had constructed their lives in earlier times. There were the concepts of the “man trapped in a woman’s body” and passing women, perhaps the predecessors of young and working-class butches. And there were the “romantic friends” and “devoted companions” of earlier eras who presented something of a model for middle-class lesbians. But there had been in America nothing like the politically aware homophile groups of Germany that had begun to organize in the late nineteenth century, not long after the German sexologists such as Krafft-Ebing categorized the lesbian, nor like the diverse lesbian societies of France that emerged in the late nineteenth century out of the sexually open
belle epoque.
¹
In contrast to lesbians in those countries, American lesbians after World War II had to start almost from scratch to formulate what the growing lesbian society should be like. With little help from the generations who went before them, they had to find ways to exist and be nurtured in an environment that they had to build outside of the larger world that they knew disdained them.

Working-Class and Young Lesbians: The Gay Bars

Not only were American lesbians without a history such as helped to guide other minority groups, but they were also without a geography: there were no lesbian ghettos where they could be assured of meeting others like themselves and being accepted precisely for that attribute that the outside world shunned. There was little to inherit from the past in terms of safe turf, though safe turf was crucial to lesbians as a despised minority. Young and working-class lesbians, who were even often without their own comfortable domiciles in which to receive their friends, had no choice but to frequent public places where they could make contact with other lesbians, but it was essential that those public places be clandestine enough to ensure privacy, since exposure could be dangerous. It was for that reason that the lesbian bar, called, like the male homosexual bar, a “gay” bar—dark, secret, a nighttime place, located usually in dismal areas—became an important institution in the 1950s.

There were a few attempts by working-class and young lesbians in the 1950s and ’60s to build institutions other than the gay bars. The most notable was the softball team. During those years many lesbians formed teams or made up the audiences for teams all over the country. Women’s softball leagues usually had at least one or two teams that were all lesbian, and most of the other predominantly heterosexual teams had a fair sprinkling of lesbians. The games did succeed in providing legends and heroes for the lesbian subculture, as well as offering both participants and viewers some possibility for making lesbian contacts outside of the bars. However, as a California woman recalls of her softball playing days, “We had no place to go after the games but the bars.” The bars were often even the team sponsors, providing uniforms and travel money. And it was “an unwritten law,” according to a Nebraska woman who played during the ’50s, that after the game you patronized the bar that sponsored you. Young and working-class lesbians who had no homes where they could entertain and were welcome nowhere else socially were held in thrall by the bars, which became their major resort, despite attempts to escape such as the formation of athletic teams.
²

Although the gay bars posed various dangers, many young and working-class women were thankful for their existence. They represented the one public place where those who had accepted a lesbian sociosexual identity did not have to hide who they were. They offered companionship and the possibilities of romantic contacts. They often bristled with the excitement of women together, defying their outlaw status and creating their own rules and their own worlds.

To many young and working-class lesbians the bars were a principal stage where they could act out the roles and relationships that elsewhere they had to pretend did not exist. The bars were their home turf. Once inside, if they could blur from their line of vision the policeman who might be sitting at the end of the bar, waiting for a payoff from the owner or just making his presence felt for the fun of being threatening, it seemed that it was the patrons, the lesbians there, who set the tone and made the rules. Occasional straights or “fish queens” (heterosexual men whose primary sexual interest was in cunnilingus and who hoped to find prospects in a lesbian bar) might wander in. But it was the lesbians who were the majority, and for a change they had the luxury of being themselves in public.

The bars were a particular relief for many butch working-class women because it was only there that they could dress “right,” in pants, in which they felt most comfortable. There were few jobs in the 1950s for which women might wear pants, and still not many public places they could go and not be somewhat conspicuous. It was after work, at night, in the bars, that butches could look as they pleased—where it was even mandated that they should look that way.

But the most important aspect of the bars to young and working-class women was that they provided a relatively secure place where lesbians could connect with other lesbians, whether for friendship, romance, or (more rarely) casual sex. How else might a young or working-class woman meet lesbians? It was certainly not safe simply to approach a woman at work or in the neighborhood. If you suspected that another woman was gay you went through lengthy verbal games, dropping subtle hints, using the jargon of the subculture (not many straights even knew that the word “gay” meant anything other than “merry” in those days), waiting for her to pick up your clues before you dared to reveal yourself. It required great effort and some risk. In the bars there were no such difficulties.

But although the gay bars were for many young and working-class lesbians their only home as authentic social beings, they were hazardous for various reasons. They posed a particular danger because they encouraged drinking. You could not stay unless you had a drink in front of you, and bar personnel were often encouraged to “push” drinks so that the bar could remain in business. As a result, alcoholism was high among women who frequented the bars, much more prevalent, in fact, than among their heterosexual working-class counterparts. Not only did lesbians have pressure to drink while in a gay bar, and, as the cliche of the pulp novels suggested, take to drink because of the daily pain of the stigma of lesbianism, but they also had to endure the socioeconomic difficulties of their lives as self-supporting women in low-paying jobs at a time when females were not supposed to work. Donna, an American Indian woman who had lived in Los Angeles during the 1950s, remembers:

Some gay men I knew took me to a One [homophile organization] meeting in L.A. I liked it, but it wasn’t for women at my level. I was working in a plastics factory. I couldn’t think about political movements. Neither could the other women I knew. We did a lot of drinking because the poorer you are, the easier it is to take if you’re half-loaded. At the bar where I hung out a lot of women would come after work. We’d work all day with nothing to show for it, and we felt we might as well buy a beer where we could be around company of our own kind.
³

Heterosexual women of their class, who were usually housewives in the 1950s, were less likely to suffer the angry conflicts of working hard to be self-supporting while realizing that one could not get far beyond subsistence and a few dimes left over for small diversions. Many working-class lesbians saw drinking in a gay bar as the one pleasure open to them. They were not very different from heterosexual males of their class in this respect.

The rebel lifestyle, in which these women as lesbians demanded some of the social privileges and customs ordinarily reserved for men, may also have encouraged heavy drinking among them. Those who challenged social orthodoxies about sexuality in the 1950s and ’60s found it not only easier, but even
necessary,
to challenge other orthodoxies, such as the appropriateness of sobriety for females. They would drink if they pleased, drink “like a man.” Drinking in the 1950s became another means for lesbians to refuse the confinement of femininity.
⁴

However, it was not the drinking problem alone that made the gay bars a dangerous place to be. While the police frequently harassed butch-looking women on the streets, the worst police harassment took place inside the gay bars. In many cities, as long as a bar owner was willing to pay for police protection, the bars seemed relatively safe—unless it was close to an election period in which the incumbent felt compelled to “clean up” the gay bars for the sake of his record. During those times raids were frequent. The bars sometimes took precautions against raids. At the Canyon Club in Los Angeles, a membership bar patronized by both gay men and gay women, dancing would be permitted only in the upstairs room. If the police appeared at the door, a red light would be flashed upstairs and the same-sex partners on the dance floor would know to grab someone of the opposite sex quickly and continue dancing. At the Star Room, a lesbian bar on the outskirts of Los Angeles, women could dance but not too close. The manager would scrutinize the dance floor periodically with flashlight in hand. There had to be enough distance between a couple so that a beam from the flashlight could pass between them. In that way the owner hoped to avoid charges of disorderly conduct should there be any undercover agents among the patrons.